How Steve Bannon Conquered CPAC—and the Republican Party

In 2013, Bannon was something of an outcast at CPAC. This week he spoke at the conference as one of the right’s most powerful figures.

PHOTOGRAPH BY T. J. KIRKPATRICK / REDUX

On Thursday, Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s most influential adviser, and Reince Priebus, Trump’s frequently embattled chief of staff, spoke together at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual gathering for activists, politicians, and media professionals on the right. Bannon rarely speaks in public, but the two men have been conducting a media tour to tamp down stories about friction between them.

Bannon, who is a large man, was dressed in wrinkled khakis and an open shirt that Priebus teased him about. Priebus was dressed like Alex P. Keaton. Bannon spoke in fiery language, condemning the press and global élites and insisting that Trump would implement the nationalist agenda that he promised in his campaign speeches. “This is the other thing that the mainstream media or opposition party never caught, ” Bannon said. “He's laid out an agenda with those speeches for the promises he made. And our job every day is just to execute on that. ”

Priebus was milquetoast, and his emphasis was on agenda items that have been free of the controversies that have engulfed Trump’s Bannon-inspired plans on immigration and foreign policy. He noted that Trump “hit his agenda every single day, whether it's T.P.P., whether it's deregulation, whether it's Neil Gorsuch,” Trump's Supreme Court nominee.

If there is a war between the two men to influence Trump, it was clear on Thursday why Bannon is winning. In bureaucratic fights, a White House staffer with strong and clear ideas, even ones that are bad, will beat a rival with no ideas every time.

The Bannon-Priebus appearance was a reminder of how quickly Bannon’s view of conservatism came to defeat Priebus’s. Back in March, 2013, Bannon was something of an outcast at CPAC. In the wake of Mitt Romney’s loss in the 2012 Presidential election, conservatives were trying to emphasize their movement’s diversity and tolerance. The prevailing takeaway from the election was that the right had grown too old, too white, and too intolerant—and so CPAC, which often serves as an incubator for ideas emerging on the far right, needed to downplay the fringes of the movement.

The lineup of speakers that year was by no means a collection of squishy Republicans: the two biggest stars were the former Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin and Donald Trump. But the emphasis from the main stage was on a welcoming small-government conservatism, and the energy in the audience came from libertarian activists, who stormed the conference and helped Senator Rand Paul win the meeting's Presidential straw poll.

Bannon, who was the head of Breitbart News, roamed the halls as a disgruntled and dishevelled fringe player. Before the conference, he had scanned the schedule and complained that CPAC’s organizers had cast out the voices representing what he viewed as the real issues on the right: the threat from Islam, illegal immigration, and corporate America’s influence on politics.

He organized an evening of counterprogramming to highlight those issues, which he called the Uninvited. Even at the most conservative gathering in America, Bannon liked to play the role of aggrieved outsider.

On the CPAC sidelines, Bannon described his alternative lineup to an interviewer: “A former Attorney General from the Bush Administration talking about jihad and the élites' inability to recognize it. Peter Schweizer talking about crony capitalism. Pam Geller, Robert Spencer, Frank Gaffney, Nina Shea talking about the global persecution of Christians. These are huge topics. Illegal immigration. These are huge issues. They have to be vetted.”

“This is a conservative conference, supposedly,” the interviewer asked. “Why are these voices being silenced, in your opinion?” “I don’t want to speculate,” Bannon said.

Geller was viewed by most Republican leaders as an anti-Muslim extremist. In April, 2013, the month after CPAC, she called for “profiling of Muslims,” “surveillance of mosques,” and “an immediate halt of immigration by Muslims into nations that do not currently have a Muslim-majority population.” In 2015, she organized a “Draw Muhammad” contest, in Garland, Texas, where two men opened fire and were killed by police. Donald Trump, who had not yet surrounded himself with anti-Islam advisers, tweeted, “The U.S. has enough problems without publicity seekers going out and openly mocking religion in order to provoke attacks and death. BE SMART.” In an interview with “Inside Edition” he said, “I have absolutely no respect for her. She’s putting people at great danger.”

Gaffney’s views on Islam are so extreme that CPAC’s board voted to ban him from the event after he accused its leaders of being secret agents for radical Islam and suggested that one CPAC leader was part of “an influence operation” that “is contributing materially to the defeat of our country, supporting a stealthy effort to bring Shariah here.”

Two years later, the world view pushed by Geller and Gaffney would become central to Trump’s campaign for the Presidency. (Sebastian Gorka, a self-styled expert on Islam and terrorism who now works at the White House, was a regular guest on Gaffney’s radio show.)

As for Schweizer, he remains the president of the Government Accountability Institute, a nonprofit that he co-founded with Bannon, in 2012. The institute incubated “Clinton Cash,” the book by Schweizer that perhaps did more than anything else during the 2016 campaign to frame the Clintons as corrupt tools of an international donor class.

So what was Priebus, who was then the chairman of the Republican National Committee, doing in 2013 while Bannon was promoting these views at CPAC? On the Monday after the conference, Priebus released a now infamous report about how Republicans could take back the White House. The key insight was that Republicans needed to reach out to nonwhite groups, use more tolerant language, and “embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.” Priebus wanted the report to serve as a road map for the Party’s 2016 Presidential candidate. Trump, of course, ignored it and turned Hispanics and Muslims into the bogeymen of his campaign. He heeded the direction of Bannon, who argued that increasing the G.O.P.’s share of the white vote was a surer path to victory.

It was no wonder, then, that Bannon looked so confident onstage on Thursday, while Priebus seemed fidgety and nervous. Acknowledging that his views have taken over the movement, Bannon at one point turned to Matt Schlapp, the president of the American Conservative Union, which hosts the event, and said, “I want to thank you for finally inviting me to CPAC.”

Ryan Lizza, an on-air contributor for CNN, was The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent from 2007-2017.